


up on the roof

by ls201



Category: American Horror Story
Genre: Angst, F/M, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, after the finale, this is really bad i'm sorry it was just kind of a random blurb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 18:35:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4070305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ls201/pseuds/ls201
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>now that the ghosts all have the house to themselves, violet's got a lot of time to contemplate things.</p><p>and when it all gets to be too much, she goes up on the roof.</p>
            </blockquote>





	up on the roof

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! this was a random little blurb that kind of just came out so i apologize in advance.
> 
> trigger warnings: self-harm, suicide

Violet tried to convince herself it didn’t bother her. What kind of girl fell in love with a monster, anyway? For so long, she’d tried to make up excuses for Tate in her head. When she’d found out about the fifteen innocent lives he’d ended. _He regretted it, he was a good person at heart._ When her father had informed her Tate had raped her mother. _He’s messed up from years of living under Constance’s thumb._ When he’d confessed to murdering Chad, Patrick, and countless others. _He didn’t know any better. They weren’t good people anyway._ The first excuse disintegrated completely when the rape was uncovered. The second excuse seemed weak when Tate admitted to the murders. And as for the third excuse, Violet had realized eventually that you cannot determine who deserves to die and who does not, and so she abandoned that notion.

 

Being alone is just as easy as Violet had imagined it to be, and yet just as hard as she’d feared. It had been ridiculously simple to shove Tate away with tears in her eyes and scream at him to go away, the words spilling from her lips as easily as those pills had slipped between them several months ago.

 

Letting Tate go was the easy part. Existing without him was harder.

 

Violet wasn’t really _existing_ , per say.  She was more in a middle state; caught between existing and not. Violet knew that she wasn’t visible to the average joe, but she also knew that she was still around in some sense, skulking around the house when her parents didn’t force her to interact with them.

 

On nights when the baby cried too loudly or the tearing of her own skin couldn’t drown out the sounds of Hayden’s bed squeaking through the thin wallpaper, Violet escaped to the roof. The roof was the one part of the house that had not been tainted by Tate; Violet had discovered it on her own, and she was grateful for that. Everywhere in that godforsaken house reminded her of the curly-haired monster, even her own fucking _bedroom_. 

 

The roof was a safe place. The roof was _Violet’s_ place, and on nights when Violet could not bear the sounds around her, she escaped there. Up on the roof, Violet liked to pretend that the stars were shining brightly for her, even if it sounded exactly like the kind of cheesy bullshit Tate would have gushed her way a few years ago. 

 

Up on the roof,  Violet would hold out her hand in front of her and trace the outlines of it with her eyes. _Am I real?_ she’d wonder. _And if I am real… then how?_

 

She wonders if maybe this is just some suburbanized hell that Satan’s stuck her in for being her suicidal teenage self. If Satan isn’t the blonde bitch next door, that is.

 

Violet wishes they’d never moved to this goddamn house.

 

Up on the roof, she thinks a little differently. Despite the awful light pollution of Los Angeles, the stars seem to twinkle gloriously over the Murder House — probably just another screwy thing about this place. 

 

The stars gleam, and they remind Violet of so many things, most of them so painful they make her skin crawl, and she cringes so hard she fears she’ll fall off the roof (though it doesn’t matter, she won’t fucking stay dead anyway). 

 

The stars gleam like her razor, her only comfort back when the risk of death or serious injury had actually meant something. Now all her razors seemed dull, but Violet used them anyway, if only for old time’s sake — and maybe just her own little way at getting back at Tate, breaking her stupid promise that he’d clung onto like a drowning soul clutches at a life raft. 

 

Her parents never asked about the cuts. Though Violet hides them well, concealed under small, fake smiles and sweaters with a faint scent of death, she knows she’s slipped up a few times — like when she threw herself down the stairs, back in the early days when she’d experimented with every method of death in her grasp, in the hopes that one of them might actually work. The loud crash had attracted the others, including her parents, and when Violet awoke with a start, she’d immediately pulled down the sleeve that had been tugged upwards during her fall. Hayden had even made a bitchy remark about it a few days later, so Violet knows the scars were visible to the others.

 

No one cared. If it bothered Ben and Vivian, they didn’t confess, and so after a brief period of panic-driven recovery, Violet resumed her favorite morning ritual. The bright flash of blood helps her get through the day, even if that only means another 24 hours of drifting around aimlessly, gazing at the world outside that she’ll never get to see.

The stars gleam like Tate’s eyes, the way they’d shined when Violet first said “I love you.” That’s probably the memory that stings the most, Violet thinks. Whenever the stars resemble Tate, Violet retreats to the bathroom and pulls out something that will make her forget.

 

The stars gleam, radiating the same kind of warmth that Violet had felt when her mother hugged her. Now the only person who feels that warmth is the baby, and it makes Violet cry for the impossible — cry for how badly she wants to die.

 

The stars gleam, and sometimes it’s a pretty sight, but most nights it just hurts. Violet tries to convince herself that it doesn’t bother her.

 

That’s what she always does.


End file.
